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Alternative Markets to Weather the Trade Storm

To discuss the future of regionalized agricultural supply chains and sustainable financing, we’re joined by Dan Miller, founder and CEO of Steward.

 

 

Steward is a unique financing platform focused on supporting agricultural producers and businesses throughout the entire supply chain. As we approach the uncertainties of 2025, including trade policies, tariffs, and the landscape of a second Trump administration, Miller shares insights on how regionalized supply chains can offer resilience in the face of global market volatility. He discusses Steward’s approach to financing and how their model prioritizes producer control, regional processing infrastructure, and long-term sustainability. 

“We’ve been working on a lot of regional scale projects, networks of producers through to regional scale milling, such as a flour mill or oatmeal, that that connects to the finished buyer. And I think what we’ve found is a lot of the American manufacturing capacity evaluated, agricultural capacity, has been consolidated out the past generation as they’ve had some of the open market trade deals. So a lot of that infrastructure that has been gutted has left the farmer beholden to kind of global markets and global supply chains for prices and their product. That’s led to a lot of consolidation by the big packers and the big intermediaries, and it’s given producers very few options. When there’s only one mill in the entire region, that’s the place that you have to sell it. So a lot of the projects we’ve been involved with is trying to get more of that value chain and that involves re regionalizing those models. We’re working with wheat growers in Inland Northwest that currently grow this beautiful grain that just gets dumped on barges and shipped as commodity wheat to China to be milled in noodles. And instead they’re selling it to a local mill that they have an ownership stake in, that’s milling the product with a mix of roller and stone mills to a really high spec and full traceability and selling that to buyers in the Northwest. I find that kind of supply chain is a lot more resilient to the current agriculture model. It’s not reliant on buyers all across the globe moving product all around, but it’s also resilient to the policy shocks. And that was really the model that we created at Steward is how do we have private financing, you know, values driven, but private financing that’s not relying on government policy or programs. And unfortunately so much of agriculture is reliant on government policy and programs. So our view is if you can control that regional value chain, it’s much more resilient from the producer perspective, but it’s also resilient from the shocks that we’re going to see upcoming.”

Other trade areas of concern surround the potential Mexico Canada tariff coming down the pipeline as soon as President elect takes office. Does that differ from Chinese tariffs?

“There’s definitely more integrated model with those countries with the land border, but those broad trade policies still have had impacts. We’re working with a group of farmers in Iowa and Minnesota who are building a producer owned oatmeal that’s they’re going to grow about 20,000 acres of oats. They’re going to mill them and sell them directly to end buyers. The oat market has actually become dominated by Canada since, since kind of NAFTA and the free trade. And over 90% of the oats in the US are Canadian oats, often marketed as American sourced oats, or that’s what the perception is. So … if there are tariffs, it’s obviously going to impact markets, but it’s going to allow this type of regional supply chain that’s already underway to really have a lot more strength behind it. And the benefit of adding oats into Midwestern rotation is now in terms of soy and corn, there’s another crop in there that’s going to help with soil fertility, that’s going to help with diversification. They’re also planting cover crops after the oats. By adding more diversity and more product selection, the farmers are going to have more choices. So I definitely there will be impacts, imported feed, imported fertilizer, imported inputs. But I think it’s a recognition that it’s important to have within a watershed, within a region the capacity to produce, process and sell products and not be reliant on global supply chains the way the world has been. Not for a huge amount of time, really just the past 50, 60 years that that model’s been dominant.”

Again that’s Dan Miller with Steward and that’s a look at news of agriculture on the American Ag Network, I’m Corryn La Rue.

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